


like a fire gone wild

by temporalDecay



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bulges and Nooks, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Clothed Sex, Dream Bubbles, F/M, Sloppy Makeouts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 14:37:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4266978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/pseuds/temporalDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two slaves cope with death, freedom, hate, life and each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a fire gone wild

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jokess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jokess/gifts).



> I did my best to incorporate all the elements of the prompt I was given. I hope you enjoy it, it was really fun to revisit these two in a quadrant I'd never really considered!

“You’re a fraud.” 

The words startle her and she tries to lash out at the prospect of not being alone, but she can’t quite turn completely when there’s already a hand holding her elbow and keeping her from pointing a wand at the source of the voice. 

Against better judgment, she doesn’t unleash her power in full, finding instead herself relaxing somewhat as she stares into white, empty eyes and a smug smirk. 

“Says who?” She snaps back, eyes narrowed but just as empty and white, and another bubble of hysteric jubilation bursts in the pit of her stomach, spreading tiny effervescent warmth across her soul that tastes like _freedom_. 

“Me,” he still hasn’t let go of her, and instead he shakes her slightly before pulling her close. “I spent eternity thinking about that bullshit you fed him, about not caring about anyone and being happy to see trollkind burn themselves to nothing.” He leans in to smile against her cheek, and she is acutely aware this is little more than payback for all the times she did the same, haunting the lone figure hanging from biowires and drowning in regret. It doesn’t make it any nicer, but at the same time, she doesn’t exactly feel like pulling away. Instead she tilts her head back, her horns threatening to gore his face for his troubles, but instead resting lightly against a shoulder. “If you really didn’t care about any of us, there are objective easier ways to do what you needed done and so you’re just stupid. If you did care, all your posturing was lie after lie for the sake of not owning up to the truth, and you’re nothing more than a lying coward.” He chuckles and lets go of her when she does lash out, hovering back as the lightning crawls up her body, but red instead of that odious green. “Either way, you’re a fraud.” 

She finds herself getting a taste of what her own power has become, after eternity of being supplanted by His. She takes a savage glee in realizing they’re dead, they’re free, and whatever they do doesn’t matter anymore, so why should she hold back? 

He’s certainly not. 

  


* * *

  


She’s shed her history, after one too many fights, and when she goes to meet him, her clothes have changed to match. Gone is the thin, bright green dress that looked to have been painted on, rather than worn. Instead, she’s wearing a loose, comfortable shirt in red, with huge, billowing sleeves halfheartedly folded back, and a pair of equally loose and comfortable pants in black. He stares and stares, trying to pinpoint where the fearsome wrath has squirreled away into the folds of her clothes. She looks small, she looks common place. He’s spent eternity, before and after death, orbiting around a singularity of hate and power that rivals even his, but she no longer looks the part. 

“I remembered that I’m dead,” she tells him, smirking as she reaches a hand to pull her hair loose. “I remember I can look anyway I damn well feel like.” And then, because their… thing is predicated on telling the truth, to make up for all the lies they told during their lives, she throws the band at his face, snickering. “Now who’s the fraud?” 

He looks down at himself and for a moment, feels panicked betrayal that she’d mock him for what he cannot change. His history is written not in clothes and intangibles, but carved word by word on his own flesh. Scars and bits missing where the skin dips in almost to the bone, the ghost of biowires and an echo of a thunderous laughter that defined his world for far too long. 

And then he too remembers that he is dead, and that for the dead all that defines them is their will to keep on existing. 

“Shut up,” he says, and thinks _thank you_ , even as he throws all his strength at her. 

Her laughter is soft and sinuous, sneaking in under his skin and making it crawl with things he can’t quite name yet, for fear he might not be able to do them justice. 

  


* * *

  


They fight and fight and fight some more, slowly working out eons of rage and distilling it into harmless violence that would have shattered entire planets, if there had been planets left to destroy. Instead they just bounce off each other, measuring where one’s powers end and the other’s begin. They bicker and use every opening to end up snarling and burning the air into a tang of ozone and lost hopes. They have many, many fights to act out on, after so many centuries of mocking and flirting and taunting that went nowhere because her power wasn’t hers and his will no longer belonged to him. But the masters are gone, in the grey of not-life and not-death. The masters are gone and cannot stop them from being who they want to be. She owns up to her smirks and her taunts and proves to him she can flirt much better than he remembers her. He snarls back lewdness and shows her what his leers look like, without goggles and the helm hiding them from sight. 

It should be obvious, what the next step would be, for feelings as layered and entwined as theirs, but they’re nothing if not stubborn and each refuses to give the first step. Each refuses to own up to their own wants. 

So the catalyst must come from outside, rather than within, from realizing they’re not the only ones who died and moved into the limbo of memories best left forgotten. 

“Why are you still here?” She asks, when he finds her again, looking nonchalant as ever. “They already left.” 

The possibilities open wide between them, gaping like a maw wanting to swallow them whole. 

“You know why.” 

And she does. 

She hates him twice as much because of it. 

That day, they do not fight, do not threaten to tear open the fabric of the memory holding them in place. 

That day they sit in silence and let it say everything they are both too proud to admit. 

  


* * *

  


They are creatures of actions, not of words. He always let his betters speak for him, to make his feelings understandable and truthful. She never had any say at all, in anything she did, the when and how and where. Now they are also creatures of the present, stuck forever in the now that carries on the momentum granted by memories of lives long over. There is no rhyme or reason to the existence they still claim as their own, no real sense of time, no real purpose to guide them through the paths of distorted past. 

But they’re still creatures of action, and when violence failed to purge them clean of resentment and pulsing hate, they fall back into the ancient dance of actions to try and mitigate the tedium of their deaths. 

Her kisses taste of misery and rage and the doom of countless lives. He devours what she offers with a single-minded determination to match her no matter where she goes. He bites her lips with crooked fangs and grins when she bites back, because it only makes him want to drown in her forever. He kisses her with the same feral violence that he fights her with, static crackling on his skin and prickling hers, and she digs her claws on his skin, hard enough to be felt long after she’s gone, but without leaving even a ghost behind afterward. 

She kissed him first, and she walked away, before he could do any more than kiss back and try to hold onto her. 

So now that’s the game they play, circling around each other, looking for an open to strike. A blow powerful enough to shatter a mountain in half followed by a breathless kiss that ignites the fire in their gut. And then she walks away or he turns his head, because today taunting was more important than going through with it. 

Others come and go, try to offer to take him or her or both along their exploration of the afterlife, and every time they watch them go in silence, sitting atop a ruin no one ever really cared for, hands touching but not holding. 

  


* * *

  


On and on, they go, eons of frustration and mounting a resistance to wants that grow more urgent after every meeting. On and on, they go, pretending they’re not afraid of finding it dull and disappointing and meaningless, like everything else about death, that last beacon of self they’ve got left. 

On and on, until one day the bubble bursts and they fall, not so much into nothingness as into _everything_. 

One day, they wake up in a field of weeds and grass, the sky blue, and light pouring gentle warmth against their skin. 

Inexplicably alive, full of that throbbing pulse of power echoing the beating of a heart, he turns to her and laughs, voice not quite as mocking as she remembers it. She remembers the script she worked so long to complete. She remembers nothing of grasslands in a planet with a sun that doesn’t scorch the skin off their bones. She remembers nothing that wasn’t ruin and suffering. 

“They actually won,” she summarizes, one eyebrow arched. “Fancy that.” 

“Well, don’t sound so excited.” He tries to deadpan, but there’s so much caught up in his chest it feels like it’s about to burst into laughter that will never stop. “Being alive is good.” 

“Being alive means you can die,” she retorts, scoffing. “I enjoyed not having to worry about breaking you.” 

“ _She_ didn’t break me,” he says, tilting his chin up defiantly, “what makes you think you can?” 

She reaches up to dig her hands into his hair, pulling his face down until they’re breathing the same air, and it’s sweet and heavy in their lungs, after so long without it. 

“Because you _want_ me to break you,” she whispers, lips all but ghosting his, “and I have half a mind to do it.” 

When he lounges at her, she takes up into the air, crackling red sparks in her wake, and it takes him only a moment before giving chase. The meadow melts into a forest, which gives way into a city sprawling comfortably against the shore of an ocean. They fly and rain sparks wherever they go, two stars glowing in the middle of the day, and below the world keeps on turning, as if it were nothing extraordinary that it did. 

She laughs when he catches her, long, long after the sun has fallen behind the horizon, because even in the middle of a storm of psionics powerful enough to rip this newborn world to shreds, he’s gentle even when he lays her on the ground. The forest where he’s cornered her is not the same one they passed by when they began, the leaves are a different shade of green above their heads, and she notices because she will never not find her eyes squinting at the color. But then his mouth is on hers, and the difference sends her stomach lurching as she clings and pulls him down. 

“Are you scared?” He asks her, pressing his body against her as if to complete the circuit and give an exit to the static boiling in his veins. 

“No,” she smirks, and takes one of his hands in his, guiding it to rest in the valley between her breasts. She snickers when his breath hitches, pressing her other hand to the nape of his neck and shoving a pulse of electricity straight into his spine that makes him choke on a moan. “But if you fuck this up, I will never let you live it down.” 

“God, you’re a bitch,” he whispers, dropping his forehead to rest against hers, tentatively rubbing his hand side to side on her chest, trying to scout out the terrain. “Even now.” 

“Maybe!” She arches her back, taunting, and a leg folds up, her knee rubbing against the inside of his thigh. “At least I’m not an asshole pretending to be a better person than I am.” 

It’s true, of course. They used to lie and taunt and flirt and make promises they never intended to keep. But that was before. Now, the masters are gone and the chains remain broken and truth is all they have to offer each other. Truth sharpened into a blade that cuts flesh clear off the bone. Truth that burns brighter than their combined powers. Truth that echoes deep inside their souls, like the ripples in a pond. 

He kisses her, then, and she kisses back. And for a moment it’s only that, only the well-threaded paths they’ve carved out of eternity, only brighter and stronger because life keeps coiling in spirals on their skin. And then her mouth opens, a taunt more than an invitation, and he presses harder, as if he could find the right angle to just melt into her. 

She presses a hand between his legs, abrupt, and then fires lightning straight into his bones. He breaks the kiss to scream, not in pain or pleasure or anything simple enough to be described, and then he falls on his side next to her, breathing harshly. He can’t quite make out her face through the fog of hate clouding his eyes, but he reaches out nonetheless, to wrap himself around her and then flood her senses with his own brand of lightning. She convulses in his arms, mouth half open in a string of profanity that never makes it past her tongue, and shoulders shaking ever so slightly between every breath. 

“We’re going to destroy each other before we’re done,” he realizes, as he runs his hand down her shoulder, past the swell of a small breast, further down the subtle curve of her waist and the raise of her hips. He wants to make a map of every corner and turn and twist in her body, and he’s not sure he’s allowed to. “Aren’t we?” 

She replies by digging her claws through his clothes, leaving an imprint in his chest that will last, now that his body can’t just pull itself back together from memory. 

“But it’ll be fun, while it lasts,” she promises, pushing harder until he’s lying on his back, and then throws a leg across his hips, straddling him in a way that should have made her seem small and frail, but only made him feel his skin tingle with want. “And that’s all that matters.” 

It’s not. It’s really not, but she’s got leaves and twigs caught up in her hair, because now it’s real and not a memory and the sheer length of it curls and falls everywhere, still free from its bonds. And then her hands fold one on top of the other, right above his heart, and push with power that makes his heartbeat skip three beats and his vision swim. She’s laughing, as he comes down, both literally and metaphorically, his back un-bowing and lying flat on the forest floor, and his groin drenched in genetic material like an adolescent troll fumbling to find the right side of a pail. 

“God, you’re useless,” she says, laughing at his embarrassment and raising up on her knees so she can brazenly sneak a hand into her pants. The sound he makes at the sight doesn’t really count as a suitable rebuttal, more so when her other hand begins to play with her small breasts. “Absolutely useless.” 

He used to imagine this, long ago, after she pressed herself to his body and taunted him about wanting what he couldn’t have. Every time she left him there, hanging from the shackles made of flesh and unable to do anything about the fire roaring in his groin, he’d imagine her like this. Her fingers digging through the folds of her nook, her bulge coiling around her wrist, and her nearly-nonexistent breasts heaving with effort after each breath. 

It’s nothing like he’d imagine, the reality of it. Without the dress – which he thinks she’ll never wear again, so long as she’s got a say in the matter – he can’t quite make out what she’s doing, only the vague, tantalizing hints through the rhythmic movements of her hands. Her clothes are billowy and purposely shapeless, reducing her body to an impression rather than a statement. She’s arms and legs, buried somewhere underneath the fabric wrapped loosely around them, almost intangible. Her hair is wild and curled, drawing waves to frame her face and her thin shoulders, cascading down onto the floor and forming a carpet over the moss and stones beneath them. 

When she throws her head back, eyes closed in bliss, he can feel electricity racing up his spine. 

“Good fucking job,” he say instead of all the ridiculous things bubbling in his mind, clicking his tongue against his fangs as he smirks, ignoring the puddle of genetic material spreading all around them. “We’re not dead, you know, we actually have to clean up the mess.” 

She pulls her shirt off a lot faster than he’d expected, considering the massive swirl of her horns, and then summarily throws it at his face. Before he can splutter a complaint, her pants follow swiftly. Then she’s standing there, skin bare and pale red glistening down her thighs; and the ridiculousness of the scene doesn’t really hold a candle against the lust stirring in his bones. 

“Your mess now,” she says simply, shameless in her nudity in a way he knows he’s too self-conscious to emulate. 

“Our mess,” he insists, standing up slowly and refusing to swallow as hard as he wants to. 

Nonetheless he tries to be as cavalier as she is, because that is the whole point of this. He lets her clothes fall to the ground and slowly starting the tedious process of removing his. Beneath the stretchy fabric of his suit, his skin is as flawless as hers, and he feels like a fraud under her scrutiny, because he never did quite manage to will away the scars when they were dead and now this new life has seen fit to take them from him without any choice in the matter. 

She hovers in place, feet gently leaving the ground, and then floats herself back away from the mess at his feet. She sits back on the ground, propped up in a small rock so she can cant her hips up as her legs fall open enough for his throat to go dry at the promises between them. 

“It’s us,” she says, reaching a hand down to press two fingers along the ridges of her bulge, all the way down to the wet outline of her nook. His bulges tighten around each other and he feels his own moisture drip slowly down his thighs. “We can make a bigger mess than that.” 

It takes him four steps to reach her, and then he falls to his knees between her thighs, meeting her lips with his own. And then her bulge wraps around the base of his, dragging them both down and guiding them to their ultimate goal, and that single touch shifts the pitch of the humming in his ears, which only then he realizes are his powers harmonizing with hers. 

There’s nothing soft or gentle or kind about her. He’s known this since he met her and she laughed at his desperation instead of freeing him from his torment. But her body is warm and welcoming and he’s so distracted trying to understand the sensations consuming his thoughts that the sudden, ruthless press of her bulge into his own nook makes his body shudder hard enough he nearly falls into her. 

“Does it feel like you imagined?” She asks, and he doesn’t remember pressing his forehead to her shoulders or feeling the welts from her claws slowly fill up with blood along his back. “When you writhed in your helm and asked me to fuck you until it stopped hurting?” 

He returns the favor, at that, pressing his bulges past the narrow lips of her nook and smiling in cruel satisfaction when her breathing sharpens and her eyes slide half-shut. She’s small, but not frail, and her walls grip him like a vice, contracting in time with the furious lashing of her bulge inside him. She’s going to destroy him, he thinks, clinging and bowing his head, biting into the dip between her breasts to stop himself from spilling out vows he knows she wouldn’t take. 

He smells of despair and devotion, and she wants it more than anything to fashion herself a cloak made of that scent, to carry it with her wherever she may go. She scores long, curved welts along his skin, digging hard enough to make them bleed but nowhere near deep enough to leave scars. _She_ left scars on him, because she thought that made him Hers, for all the good that ever did her. No, she knows better than that. She has not the ego of an Empress, the blindness of possessiveness. She will stake her claim in her own way, and then she’ll never have to go without his song of lust and rage echoing into her skin. 

He fills her up with all the hateful things he can muster, all the chipped, worn out edges of his being and the past that still haunts him. She reciprocates with her unwavering lust for a future of her own, her refusal to bow again and all the potential cruelty at her fingertips. 

There are no promises or declarations or vows to be made, in the aftermath of such a spectacular mess. They’re creatures of actions, they see no need for words. 

  


* * *

  


Eventually, they emerge from the wildness to really explore the bizarre civilization that claims the planet as its home. There are trolls, but they don’t live like they remember trolls living, before. And there are others, there, who are soft and pink and oddly strong for all their frailty. Customs and traditions are different, new and exciting because of it. 

They part ways, as they seek out their own fortune, to build something of their own with the second chance they’ve been given and never asked for. Once upon a time, they had titles to define them, but now they use other, softer names and live lives devoid of the crushing despair they once knew. 

But still, the pulse remains. 

Still, the song curls lazily in their minds, a bond of hatred and memories they share and refuse to give up. 

And when the pressure builds up enough, when the tension threatens to snap each bone one at the time, they take to the air and find each other without looking and collide into a clash of power and freedom that has no real use anymore. 

One day, they’re sure, they will destroy each other. They must, by necessity of who they are and what they’ve done. But so long as that day keeps postponing itself, they dance and mock and anchor each other in the holiest truth they know: 

They are alive and free, and nothing short of each other will take that away from them. 


End file.
